Tag Archives: Music Hall singers

From Theatre to Music Hall

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This is an amended version of my original post on Maggie Duggan as a reader has very kindly given me the correct information about her birth. She doesn’t have a birth record at the General Register Office in London, which was common amongst poorer families. She was born in Liverpool in 1857 and not 1860 as I had thought. The 1861 census shows her family living at 47 Blenheim Street in Liverpool. Her mother, Mary, is listed as the head of the household and as a sailor’s wife. Maggie was six months old and her sister, Sarah, was nine. Both Mary and Sarah have their place of birth listed as Ireland which could explain the later confusion over Maggie’s birthplace and accent when she was on the stage.

In an interview in the trade magazine, The Era, Maggie revealed she made her first appearance in a pantomime in her early childhood at the Adelphi Theatre, Liverpool. Her salary was three shillings a week and she was expected to provide her own boots. She disagreed with people who thought it wrong that children should act in pantomime saying ‘Tis very often delightful to the youngsters – – pantomime children are very often taken from poverty-stricken surroundings and taught the rudiments of an art that may bring them fame and fortune.’ The interviewer saw this as her opinion but it could have been her own experience.

Maggie Duggan travelled as a member of a ballet troupe and then took the giant step of moving to the Cape as part of a theatre group. On arrival, she had trouble learning her lines and was so bad the manager declared he would send her home by the same boat that had brought her out. She persevered and added a hornpipe to her role which was so well received she stayed on and was at the Cape for two years. On her return to England she worked with burlesque and comic opera companies where she performed ‘breeches parts’ saying that she would feel dreadfully ill at ease in petticoats. The newspaper article is careful to add ‘that is, of course, on the stage.’ She thought a woman of her size looked ungainly in skirts on the stage.

There is a confusing remark from Maggie Duggan that the heroes of musical comedy were all played by men and, although she loved that kind of entertainment, she was looking for something different. Does this make sense after the breeches roles? Perhaps they were all burlesque. Maggie made a big splash with the Gaiety company in the second outing of the burlesque, Cinder-Ellen Up Too Late, taking the part of the Prince of Belgravia previously played by a man. During the performance she sang two music hall songs – The Man who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo and The Rowdy-Dowdy Boys.The first of these had been plugged by Charles Coburn at The Oxford but when Maggie Duggan sang it Charles Coburn’s share of the royalties rose to £600. The other song was a music hall hit for Millie Hylton.

The popularity of these songs may have finally decided Maggie Duggan to switch to music hall, although it wasn’t always easy. She lamented the lack of good songs saying she could buy a hundred and just find one worth singing. In 1900 there is an advert in the Music Hall and Theatre Review placed by Maggie Duggan requesting good low comedy and character songs. She found the lack of rehearsal in music halls equally hard as the band could often be at cross purposes with the singer during a performance. Also, in her previous career she was better known on the provincial stage and worried it would be hard to get work in London halls.
This may have been unfounded as in 1894 we find in The Era that she moved from Birmingham to the London Alhambra and ‘other west end halls.’

Maggie Duggan excelled in pantomime with her height and build making for an excellent principal boy. She was in demand in Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool and, perhaps best for her career, Drury Lane. Ada Reeve in her autobiography, Take it For a Fact, talks about working with her in Little Boy Blue in 1893. Maggie Duggan played her role as principal boy ‘in the dashing, strutting manner peculiar to those days. Her trademark was a diamond butterfly which she wore pinned to her tights on her thigh.’

In June 1905 a headline in the London Morning Leader proclaimed in heavy type, Bigamy with Maggie Duggan. The court case was brought by Mrs Amy Ward against her husband, Thomas William Ward, and she asked for the dissolution of her marriage which had taken place in 1892. The couple separated in 1895 and Amy Ward alleged her husband was guilty of desertion, bigamy and misconduct. She had recently discovered her husband had entered into a bigamous marriage with Maggie Duggan. The petitioner had her watched when she was appearing at the Tivoli Music Hall, Manchester, and discovered that she and the respondent were living as man and wife. Mr Ward admitted the bigamous marriage but had been under the impression his wife was dead. Maggie Duggan was a widow when she married Mr Ward who had shown her a newspaper advertisement which she believed to be a notice of the death of his former wife. Mrs Ward obtained a degree nisi with costs.

Maggie Duggan died in 1919 in the Liverpool workhouse infirmary from bronchial pneumonia accelerated by alcohol. She was sixty years old and had retired from the stage some fifteen years earlier.

Thanks to The British Newspaper Archive, Monomania archive, Winkles and Champagne -Wilson Disher, Take it for a Fact -Ada Reeve

Many thanks to Raymond Crawford who took the trouble to read the post and contact me with the correct information.




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An update on the mysterious relative

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I’m very pleased to have found out a little more about the life of Marie Levison/Kate Toole who featured in the previous post. Thanks to the help of @heathertweed my enthusiasm was renewed for more research. Marie/Kate was born in 1859 in Worcester and her original name was Catherine Lee. She was one of nine sisters which included my friend’s Great Grandmother, Jane Lee. It seems the family cast her adrift when she went on the stage. This story had come down through the family but was still not really talked about. According to her obituary, Catherine started her career under the stage name Marie Levison, singing and acting with various companies until she was engaged by the D’Oyley Carte company. It seems she spent some years there and then as Kate Toole took to the music halls and pantomime where, for a time, she enjoyed success. She was said to have an excellent stage presence and a rich sympathetic voice.

While my friend found out about Catherine’s beginnings I looked into her death and burial guided by @heathertweed. Kate Toole, as she was still known, died of alcohol poisoning and had been found in bed by her landlady. She was living in Bermondsey and was buried on March 5th 1903 in Nunhead Cemetery. She was 44 years old when she died. Kate was buried in consecrated ground but in a public or communal grave along with twenty-one other people. This usually happened when the deceased had no resources to pay for a private grave or no relatives prepared to pay the costs. As Catherine had changed her name twice it’s possible her family had lost track of her – a better thought than that they refused to help. The site of the grave is now a nature reserve.

The obituary states that, in her day, Kate Toole was a popular and much appreciated artiste but that in later years her name had entirely disappeared from the London programmes. We will probably never know if her star faded and she took to drink or if alcohol was the cause of her downfall, as it was with so many music hall performers. I’m glad we could give her some recognition and I feel moved by her story and grateful to have had the chance to get to know her in a small way.

Thanks to @heathertweed, British Newspaper Archive, Nunhead Cemetery

 

 

 

Vaudeville’s happiest girl

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Jen Latona, real name Emma Jane Letty Carter, was born in 1881 in Birmingham. By the age of sixteen she was appearing in music halls under the name of Jennie Gabrielle. In January 1896 the Hull Daily Mail commented on her appearance at Hengler’s describing her as ‘the child musician, who possesses a singularly sweet and mellow soprano voice’. We learn from a review of her performance at the Palace Theatre in Edinburgh that she sang humorous songs and accompanied herself on the piano and concertina.

Jennie married an American performer twenty-five years her senior, born Benjamin Franklyn Titus, whose stage name was Frank Latona. Jennie Gabrielle became Jen Latona. Frank performed as a tramp musician, playing the trombone and a one-stringed fiddle, and included various effects in his act which he constucted himself. In a handwritten pencil note on a scrap of paper Frank reminds himself to ‘make whiskers to blow out and curl up – air pumps and rubber tube’.

Frank Latona

Jen and Frank worked together as a double act with music, song, gags and repartee. In the archive of their work, presented to the Mayor of Lambeth by Jen Latona in her retirement, can be found handwritten sheets of ‘gags’, while jokes were often constructed from cut out newspaper articles. A handwritten notebook of sketches and gags contains this gem – ‘Why, that is the meanest man you ever saw. He is so mean he goes to the track and makes faces at the engineers so they will throw coal at him’. Newspaper personal ads were fair game too, with ‘Two girls want washing’ setting the standard. The couple performed extensively in New Zealand and the United States scribbling down material for their act on hotel notepaper and receiving offers of new songs from American songwriters.

Margaret Cooper

When Frank Latona retired, Jen became a successful solo performer. She was on the bill with Vesta Tilley at the opening of the Croydon Hippodrome and was described as an ‘entertainer of exceptional merit’ to be compared with Margaret Cooper, a classically trained pianist who moved over to the music hall. However the writer quickly explains that Miss Cooper’s songs are of quite a different nature but that Jen is ‘a turn quite above the ordinary found at the halls’. Jen composed much of her stage music and the sheet music of the day shows she had a prolific repertoire with such songs as I’m going to buy you the R.I.N.G. and You can’t blame a Suffragette for that.

Frank died in 1930 and Jen retired a few years later. She lived in Streatham in London and when she died in 1955 her home and possessions were put up for auction, including a Schrieber grand piano and a souvenir programme of Sarah Bernhardt at the London Coliseum in 1913. The proceeds of the sale went to the Variety Artists Benevolent Fund.

Frank had a genius for mechanical invention and invented and patented the Ednor Tank Washer. Of more interest to music hall fans here is a drawing in Frank’s hand of the workings of a dog to be used in an act with a mule.

We’ll leave the Latona’s with a final joke. ‘You are the most ignorant man I ever saw. Why, only yesterday I saw you giving hot water to the hens to make them lay hard-boiled eggs’. I hope you hear the echo of laughter.

Thanks to the British Newspaper Archive and Lambeth Archives. Images Monomania.